Apple unveiled some serious educational awesomeness at their media event in New York this morning, including the release of iBooks 2, which now includes support for new digital textbooks available on the iBookstore.
As revealed in a live blog by The Verge, The new iBooks is billed as “a new textbook experience for the iPad”, and brings several cool new things to the iBooks platform, including support for 3D animations, embedded Keynote presentations, intro movies, the ability to zoom in on high resolution images, thumbnail views for textbooks, and more.
Also new is the updated indexing and media features in iBooks 2.0 – you can pinch the book to enter or leave interactive media or view the table of contents. The indexe are also now linked with reference notes and bibliographies.
The new iBooks also does cool things with device orientation – rotating the book vertically focuses text, while rotating into landscape mode focuses on images, videos, and interactive content.
Even more exciting, the app also now features some awesome new note-taking features. Besides multi-color highlighting, notes, and annotations, the new app automatically creates flash cards from your highlights and notes, as well as glossary terms!
Make sure to check out iBooks 2.0 for yourself! It’s available now as a free update or download through the App Store (link). And make sure to take a look at the new e-textbook section in the iBookstore – free samples of all textbooks, and tons of high school textbooks for $15 or less!